Marianne Tatom Letts: Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album (Indiana University Press)

Marianne Tatom Letts

Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album

Published by Indiana University Press

Feb 14, 2011 Web Exclusive By Laura Studarus

Marianne Tatom Letts sets out to do the impossible—find a larger structure in Radiohead’s enigmatic mess. Instrumentally, she’s spot on, tonally dissecting each track of Kid A and Amnesiac with a surgeon’s precision—even if the details will probably escape all but her fellow music scholars.

It’s when Letts turns her focus to lyrics that her thesis unravels. Radiohead insists that there is no greater narrative structure to their work, and that words are chosen for sound rather than meaning. It seems presumptuous to argue otherwise. Still Letts plows on, assigning deeper truths and making connections that seem, at best, tenuous. It’s a tough pill to swallow from someone who declares that vinyl has more worth than CDs, “whose shiny surface returns the narcissistic image of the listening subject rather than the enigmatic hole of despair of the vinyl album.”

Ultimately Letts comes to the same conclusion that many fans reach: Radiohead is a band that defies explanation. That’s well and good—but it didn’t take the rest of us 197 pages to get there. (www.iupress.indiana.edu)

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